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About the Democratic National Convention Committee

In 2012, the Democratic National Convention Committee (DNCC) planned and
conducted the political convention where the Democratic Party’s candidate for
United States President was chosen. Held in a new location every four years,
the Democratic Convention draws tens of thousands of visitors and attracts the
attention of news media and individuals from across the globe. The convention
is a high-profile mega-event with worldwide significance.

Situation

Though the convention lasts only a few days, planning this important and
complex production begins more than a year in advance. As a major technology
sponsor for the Charlotte 2012 Convention, AT&T was deeply involved in
providing communications support, from the core network to security, Internet
and mobility services. A major focus: delivering a range of communications
vehicles for audiences near and far who were more dependent on their mobile
devices than during the last convention, four years earlier.

Solution

As the wireline and wireless mobility sponsor for the 2012 Democratic
National Convention, AT&T delivered robust and reliable voice, data and
Internet connectivity. The DNCC event managers used AT&T
Connect®, a voice and web conferencing solution, to plan and help run the
convention. To meet the expectations of a 2012 audience, AT&T hosted the
convention website with a scalable, cloud-based solution. In addition, because
smartphones and mobile communications played a far greater role than ever
before, AT&T helped planners develop a convention mobile ‘app’ that was
downloaded by more than 80,000 mobile smartphone users. And because highly
secure network security is essential for such a high-profile event, they relied
on AT&T for network security consulting
and solutions.

Adapting for a Changing World

AT&T came up with a
solution that was scalable, was strong, was in the cloud and worked
fantastically.”

– Andrew Binns, CIO, Democratic National
Convention Committee

The political environment may be in constant flux, but some things about
American political conventions never change. Every four years these huge,
high-profile events move to a new location, where they are created anew. They
make big news around the world. And there is no room for error.

That was the challenge for Andrew Binns, Chief Information Officer for the
Democratic National Convention Committee, as his team planned the 2012
convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. Their goals: build a communications
infrastructure robust and capable enough to ensure a trouble-free event, and
use that foundation to deliver the up-to-date communications features the world
had come to expect in 2012.

“We wanted to make sure that all of our departments, our staff, our guests
and our volunteers – everyone that had anything to do with the convention,
including the media – had a safe, reliable, always-on communications
infrastructure,” Binns said.

It seemed like the whole world would be watching. Some 35,000 delegates,
guests, VIPs and members of the media, plus 50,000 from the Charlotte area were
expected for the event.

“You probably had a hundred thousand in the local market,” Binns said, “and
once you go outside that, into the resources that we put out on the Web and via
the app and via TV, you’re well into the tens of millions.” The spotlight would
shine fiercely on Charlotte.

But change was also part of the challenge for Binns and the team. Since the
2008 convention, technology had moved fast. People had grown comfortable
getting information through mobile devices like tablets and smartphones, going
to the Internet or using mobile applications.

“The difference between this convention and the last one was substantial,”
Binns said. “It’s a four-year jump in technology. There’s a huge focus on
personal devices and data and our world has become very app-centric. That did
not exist four years ago.” The convention team wanted to use those evolving
technologies so the audience, whether on site in Charlotte or on the other side
of the globe, would feel like part of the event.

Convening the A Team

To tackle the job, Binns assembled a powerful team. “AT&T was our
largest supporter, though we had in total nearly 20 kinds of providers that we
worked with,” he said. “I had a staff of only about 15 or 16, so we relied
heavily on sponsors like AT&T.”

Signed on as an official convention sponsor, AT&T provided IT and
communication services that ranged from OC-192 and OC-48 optical fiber backbone
connections and data center space to network security consulting, cloud-based
web hosting, and audio and web conferencing. AT&T also worked hand in hand
with the convention team to create a convention app for many different types of
web enabled devices.

Reliability and network security were top priorities. Redundant fiber optic
backbone loops provided assurance against an outage, and AT&T worked with
the managers of convention sites to ensure attendees could connect through
their wireless devices. When threatening weather caused planners to move the
President’s acceptance speech to Charlotte’s Time Warner Cable Arena, AT&T
rolled its first-ever mobile distributed antenna system (DAS) into place to
make sure the audience could share their experience with the rest of the
world.

“You know,” said Binns, “everything that we built, we built in duplicate and
triplicate because you only get one shot. There are no do-overs in a live event
like this.”

Building a ‘Huge Place of Information’

A center of convention communication and outreach would be the convention
website, www.demconvention.com. “I had always imagined somebody getting out of
work, taking a bus home and wanting to understand what was going on at the
convention, or to watch the President,” Binns said. “Using their mobile device
or their laptop, wherever they were, they needed to be able to see and interact
with every piece of information that we had available.

“We had to make sure that our website was a huge place of information, where
we had some interactive tools. I wanted them to be able to pull up the website
and view a live stream of whatever was going on without any problems.”

Such performance demanded flexibility, scalability, network security and
reliability. Using AT&T
Synaptic Compute as a ServiceSM with VMware
vCloud® Datacenter Service, AT&T provided a scalable, cloud-based
infrastructure solution to host the convention website. No matter how high
website traffic might spike (something no one could predict), capacity could be
quickly scaled up as needed and end users would be served. To protect against
network threats, the company incorporated AT&T Web
Application Firewall service in its design. The AT&T Chief Security
Office conducted a full network security vulnerability analysis, resulting in
several security updates and also reviewed the DNCC core network and mobile
application.

“We went to AT&T and asked how we should do this,” Binns recalled. “I’m
going to have a bunch of people hit this website that first day of the
convention that could be in the hundreds of thousands or millions. I don’t know
what they’re going to do on the site and I don’t know how long they’re going to
stay. I had no metrics whatsoever on what people would do now on political
convention websites, because the last one was four years ago. AT&T came up
with a solution that was scalable, was strong, was in the cloud and worked
fantastically.”

A Better Way to Connect

Planning and producing such a huge event takes coordination among multiple
teams of staffers, supporting organizations and volunteers. For this, the DNNC
used several AT&T
conferencing services. Organizers trained volunteers, held planning
meetings and met with the national media using AT&T Connect, which serves
up to 125 simultaneous users. Indeed, as convention action began, AT&T and
convention staff kept an AT&T Connect conference open for hours at a time,
as they monitored website traffic and determined how to respond.

For larger groups, AT&T Connect Event Services made it possible to bring
up to 1,500 people together when needed, using the same bridge number
throughout the convention week.

Going Mobile

Mobile
devices and their apps have come a long way since the 2008 convention, and
Binns knew an app could be a key element in convention communications. Six
months before the convention started, his team sat down with AT&T to begin
the development process.

“We started with a whiteboard discussion about what we would like to do,” he
said. “I want to see a schedule. I want to see maps, photos and live video. I
want to play games. We put literally hundreds of ideas into an Excel sheet and
then categorized and ranked them. I would say in the end we had maybe 40
strong, separate ideas.

“We’re not developers or coders,” he added. “We decided on what it should
look like and how it should work, and then AT&T and their partners would
come back to us with a mockup. This kind of iterative process as we went along
worked fantastically.”

And the response from convention watchers? By the convention’s close, the mobile app
had been downloaded by more than 80,000 users.

AT&T also helped create a workaround to keep communications moving, even
if email services were disrupted. The answer was the AT&T Messaging
Toolkit, which made it possible to send texts or messages to key audiences over
the mobile network.

“What we wanted to do was make sure that if an issue were to come up with
our network or our email, we would still be able to reach all of our staff and
other people who had mobile devices and who we were working with via the cell
network,” Binns said. “This was just another instance of redundancy and
diversity.”

A Bump in Results

Looking back, Binns was pleased with the outcome in both political and
technical terms. The convention website received more than three million visits
from 210 countries, with almost two million visits in the convention’s last
three days. The site ran at 99.99 percent availability, and the core network
achieved similar reliability.

“From a high-level perspective,” Binns said, “we got a five-point bounce
from the convention, which in political terms does not happen anymore. So as a
whole, we were very successful.

“On the technology side, I’m most proud of the reliability that we were able
to offer our staff and our guests. No one had any issues. If our help desk had
been busy with phone calls and emails, then we clearly did not plan correctly.
If convention week comes along and you’re just sitting there and you actually
get to enjoy and watch the show, then you’ve planned and done everything right.
I think the majority of time we were pretty relaxed and got to actually
experience it.”

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